I could see the shapes of things and of people as the flat plane surfaces of far more complex and elaborate processes occurring in a higher dimensional location. Every human life became a trailing extension through time, not just four-limbed and two-eyed but multilimbed and billion-eyed as it wormed back from the present moment and forward into the future: a tendril, a branch on this immense, intricately writhing life tree. This biota, as science calls the totality of life on Earth.
Adding time to the world picture was like adding perspective to Renaissance paintings or finding space in the spectrum for a billion new colors, or room on the airwaves for a trillion new TV stations. There didn’t need to be spirits or aliens. Everything was immortal and holy not as a result of some hidden supernatural essence but as a consequence of its material nature in time. We ourselves were miraculous, already divine in our glorious, ordinary impossibility. And it was consciousness that brought the whole thing to life, finding structure and symmetry in it, making it sing and weep and dance. I felt sure that in some way what we call consciousness would turn out to be the long-sought unified field.
I could see that the past had to exist somewhere in order for us all to be here today, but no one could take us there or even point to it. I was now very aware of myself as the front end or leading edge of something that was pushing forward into time. But more important, it stretched behind me, thirty-four years long, diminishing at the baby tail where it twisted up into my mother’s belly and curled inward to a seed, a bud, grown from my mum’s own thirty-year-long, multilimbed total physical existence from her birth to mine. She branched back into her own mother; and so it went all the way down to the dawn of life on Earth in a single unbroken line.
And the same was true for all of us. Everything that had ever lived was a twig off the same tree, a finger on the same hand. Add time, and it became blindingly obvious that the entire tree of life on Earth was alive and physically connected, even after three and a half billion years. Not in any metaphysical way but literally, materially, back through all time toward the root. The same primordial mitochondrial cell that began its eternal self-cloning process in the primordial ocean was and is still dividing inside each and every one of us.
Could mitochondria be science’s secret word for “soul”? Could the presence of an asexual immortal organism in the depths of our physical being be responsible in any way for the sensation we have of some indwelling, undying, and infinitely wise and fulfilled essence? Had my entire experience been some kind of dialogue with my own cellular structure? Was it some literal understanding of the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below”? Was I really just a cell, in the body of the earth’s sole life-form? Was my relationship to this primordial consciousness like that of a helper T cell to a human body, for instance? Were soldiers hunter-killer cells?
When I died, others just like me would replace me and do exactly what I did. There would always be writers, telling the same basic stories over and over. There would always be policemen and teachers, too; were there ever years where no policemen were born? Every one of the ten billion skin scales that flake away each day was once filled with life and industry, but who mourns those tireless workers who live and die in staggering numbers just to maintain a human existence over eighty years? The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.
Like a caterpillar munching its merry mindless way through a leaf, the global entity, the biota beast of which we were part appeared to be devastating its environment, but something else was occurring on a different scale. The creature was consuming to fuel its metamorphosis. Even global warming could be seen as part of the incubation period, a sign of larval development reaching its crescendo, forcing us all to wake up, get moving, and leave the planet to its recovery.
Whatever it was—however you, the reader, choose to interpret this information—the experience completely rewrote me. It was a life-changing, game-changing moment that altered the trajectory of my life and work. It even gave me a kind of unshakable faith in a private religion that satisfactorily explained everything about how things work.
I’d been cursed or blessed with superhero vision, a science fiction revelation that seemed to draw to a center all the strands of my life so that everything made sense. My interest in higher dimensions, my obsession with UFOs and aliens, my job creating stories for pocket universes—it all finally added up.
In the immanent blue world, all of this had already occurred. The baby was already being born, fully grown like a fly from a maggot. Some of what they tried to show me was simply too fantastic, too reliant on higher-dimensional topographies for a 3-D mind to contain. They kept telling me to remember as much as I could as best as I could because so many of their concepts were quite simply beyond my comprehension and would not survive a return to human consciousness. “They” being distinct over-my-shoulder voices that came from inside and from somewhere else.
Television talks about the “fourth wall” of the set as being the screen itself. If so, this was a glimpse beyond the fifth wall of our shared reality. Five-dimensional intelligences could, as a condition of their geometrically elevated positions, get into our skulls quite easily, and we might expect their voices to seem to come from inside. They, in turn, could hear our thoughts as easily as we can read Batman’s private inner monologues on a 2-D page. The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity. If my experience was not metaphor, might there be things living there, in that gargantuan ecological niche? Could fertile wet planets like our Earth really be nurseries where omni-anemones fed and grew to become quicksilver angels in a timeless AllNow?
This whole interlude, I can only repeat, was far more “real” than any other I have known before or since. Its colors were more resplendent, as if glowing on a celestial HD monitor. Its emotions were finer, its words expressed as huge, perfect, orchestral aggregates of symbol, emotion, and metaphor. The definition of things, especially feelings, was sharper, and the sense of being safely and finally home was devastating, haunting. Imagine the laser-edged precision and liquid crystalline hyperreality of computer graphics taken to powers of ten, and you will still be nowhere near this other place. The vast, star-spackled quantum dream room in which I sit and write as the warships parade up and down the sparkling sunlit blue of the loch might as well be a grainy black-and-white TV signal from the 1950s compared to the purity of Kathmandu’s dazzling science fiction Elysium.
Understanding that boundary-shattering experience became fundamental to what I was doing, and I began to lose myself, to blur the limits between what was real and what was conceivable.
What happened to me can be interpreted in any number of ways. To some, it’s sure to read as just one more trip story with no relevance to the material world. Occultists of a certain persuasion will recognize the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel. My experience comfortably fit the profile for alien abduction reports, angelic contact, and temporal lobe epilepsy. None of these “explanations” for what I saw, coming as they did from a lower-resolution, flatter universe, could truly do my experience justice. Where higher dimensions are implicated, it’s wise to remember the story of the blind men and the elephant and assume that all attempts to frame Kathmandu in 3-D terms are in some way absolutely true. But if it makes it easier to deal with, feel free to assume I hallucinated the whole thing and went completely, gloriously, and very lucratively mad.
I stopped piling up rationalizations and instead dealt with what could be proven about this event, which was its undeniably positive effect on my life. Kathmandu fundamentally reprogrammed me and left me with a certainty stronger than faith that everything, even that which was sad and painful, was happening exactly the way it was supposed to.
All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.
Years of living in a materialistic culture and of outwardly giving in to a kind of culturally enforced
pessimism have left me with a more twenty-first-century, grounded view of that day in the Vajra.
Let’s say there’s a developmental level of human consciousness that was once almost mythical—Jesus, Buddha, and Allah experienced it—but which is now more freely available to a much larger percentage of the general human population, thanks to the easy bookstore and online availability of “magical” recipes and formulas, and of consciousness-altering methods.
Children of five are developmentally unable to see perspective, while children of seven can. Twelfth-century artists were unable to render vanishing points on two dimensions, while fifteenth-century painters had mastered the trick to create convincing simulations of reality. Do civilizations follow the same growth and decline curve as human organisms with the same holographic imprint reiterating through all scales?
I can see how the sudden shock of accessing a natural holistic five-dimensional perspective might strike an unprepared human nervous system as contact with an alien intelligence; a “higher”-order entelechy. As far as the brain is concerned, that’s exactly what it is. New neural pathways are being seared into the cortex by the demands of this way of seeing. I think the rational mind tries to make sense of its new perspective—as a child makes sense of the inner voice of dawning self-awareness by theorizing an imaginary playmate—by framing it in images of the alien, the uncanny, or the demonic. The fact that some people who’ve had this wake-up call report having seen aliens, while others saw Jesus, or the Devil or dead relatives, fairies or angels, suggests that the details are culturally determined.
What’s important about this experience is not whether there are “real” aliens from a fifth-dimension heaven where everything is great and we’re all friends. There may well be, but I have no real proof. Much of what I went through even makes sense within the current framework of string theory, with its talk of enclosed infinite vaults, its hyperdimensional panoramas of baby universes budding in hyperspace. The aliens are the least of it.
My Kathmandu vision of planet Earth’s singular living form, that cosmic only child whose brain cells we are, on the other hand, requires no belief in the supernatural. Simply add the time dimension to your contemplation of life, look backward down your own history and family tree, all the way to the original mother cell three and a half billion years over your shoulder from here, and tell me if you can find one single join, or a seam, or any break.
This for me was bigger than any ultradimensional or quasi-religious afterlife, which I wouldn’t be able to confirm until I died and either woke up back among the blobs or didn’t. I couldn’t deny that I was a tiny, short-lived temporary cell in something very, very big and very old. I even saw how that brute connection to every living thing might explain away the “supernatural” mysteries of things like telepathy or reincarnation as simple, direct connections between distant branches of the same majestic tree, like the tingle in your toe that sends a message to your brain, which launches your hand to scratch the itch.
I was deep inside my own story, further than I could have imagined. My sister covered my bedroom wardrobe with a collage of comics pages so that every time I faced my reflection, I appeared as one more panel in a tarot spread of scattered pages and images, part human, part fiction, a Gnostic superhero in PVC, shades, and shaved head.
As for drugs, I sampled various psychedelic compounds in the waning years of the nineties, hoping to re-create the Kathmandu connection. I was willing to write off the whole thing as some very enjoyable drug trip, but I never found a substance capable of reproducing that place, and I eventually gave up.
I was left with a stubborn conviction that when I died, my consciousness would start awake there, with the same shock of the utterly familiar, the same thrill-ride buzz of a job well done.
The initial shock of all this was replaced by a period of voices in the head, uncanny synchronicities, signs and dreams and remarkable new insights. I was haunted, inspired, possessed. I could lie on my bed, intone a homemade spell or evocation, and be transported to a convincing wraparound representation of a higher-conscious vibration where an infinite circle of golden Buddha beings solemnly overlook a white abyss into which the entire universe is funneling like water down a drain. It was even better than an issue of Warlock.
Each and every experience, even the ego-destroying blind terrors, went into the work, enriching The Invisibles and JLA a thousandfold. It was proof of the old saying “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.” In an imagination economy, where ideas, trademarks, and intellectual properties held incalculable value, the coruscating quarry face of the interior world was the place to be. There was gold in them thar ghost mines.
I even tried to consider Kathmandu in terms of the fashionable idea that temporal lobe seizures could trigger authentic “religious” experiences. This sounded even better than 5-D angels. If science had identified a purely physical brain trigger for holistic god consciousness, would it not be in our own best interests to start pressing this button immediately and as often as we can? What would happen to the murderers and rapists in our prisons if we could stimulate a temporal lobe god-contact experience that caused them to empathize with everything in the universe? If electrical spasms in the temporal lobe are indeed capable of such remarkable world-transforming effects, let’s see them become more than just another stick with which to beat an absent God to death. Push the button!
The 1990s was also the time of the ubiquitous alien head symbol, some of you may recall, a nineties freak version of the smiley face, in the era of TV’s X-Files. In my imperial delirium, I was ready to believe that something from the future was trying to break through the walls of the world, using images of superheroes and aliens as a carrier signal.
As you might imagine, it was hard to sustain this level of controlled breakdown while running a business. My cometary rise was equaled by a fall; a plunge into dissolution. The more perverse and inhuman the enemies of the Invisibles became, the sicker I got. By the time I realized I’d become semifictional, it was too late to defend myself.
The downward spiral expressed itself in darker magic as the Invisibles faced bacterial gods from a diseased twin universe. After trying out a Voudon ritual in 1993, I found myself facing down an immense scorpion creature that tried to teach me how to psychically assassinate people by destroying their “auras.” When the ritual was done, I switched on the TV to decompress and caught the last fifteen minutes of Howard the Duck, in which nightmarish extradimensional scorpion sorcerers attempted to clamber their way into eighties America. These spooky coincidences were commonplace, but I had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I wrote King Mob into the hands of his enemies. Tortured and drugged, he was made to believe his face was being disfigured by a necrotizing fasciitis bug.
Within three months, bacteria of a different kind had nibbled a hole in my cheek. My beautiful big house had degenerated into creepy, lightless squalor, with a duvet hung up in the bedroom window instead of curtains. I came out in boils, traditional signs of demon contact. Fortunately for me, I was physically fitter than I’d ever been, although it only delayed the inevitable for a few more months.
I’d been granted superpowers. I’d danced with monster gods and shaken souls with angels, but my end-of-act-2 reverse could no longer be denied. The Achilles’ heel revealed! The death trap sprung!
On the night before I was hustled into the hospital, with what I later found out was probably less than forty-eight hours to live, I hallucinated something I recognized immediately as “Christ.”
A column of light phased through the door, clear as day, then a powerful sermon seemed to download into my mind. I understood that this power I was facing was some kind of Gnostic Christ. A Christ of the Apocrypha. An almost pagan figure that I’d found at the bottom, at the last gasp. Here at the end, there was this light. Christ was with us, suffering right there with us and promising salvation. This living radiance was nothing like the morbid fever visions of hearses and twisted window frames I
’d been having. This was what turned dead-end junkies into born-again Christians, but of the whole heart-melting experience, I remember only the first resonant words:
“I am not the god of your fathers, I am the hidden stone that breaks all hearts. We have to break your heart to let the light out.” These words sounded through my head, but they were bigger and more complete than any thoughts I was familiar with; more like a broadcast. The loving voice and its powerful words seemed not to be mine and offered me a stark choice there in the living room: I could die now of this disease or stay and “serve the light.” I might as well have been recruited into the Green Lantern Corps, in what was for me a very genuine “cosmic” moment. I did as most of us would and elected to live. Like Captain Marvel, I wanted to go back to Earth armed with Eon’s knowledge. I felt I’d lived my own Arkham Asylum dark night of the soul, and without the understanding that I was on a well-trod and signposted “magical” path, I’m not sure if I could have handled my illness or recovery process quite as well.
I’d reached that point in the story where I’d survived the crisis and still had a chance to be reborn with a new costume and better powers, but it was touch and go; every passing second was the ticking clock to the ultimate life-and-death cliff-hanger.
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